New music
Kieron Tyler
Brenda Holloway: The Artistry of Brenda Holloway / Various Artists: ERA Records Northern SoulAs the home of the Motown empire, Detroit dominated American soul music in the Sixties. Yet the label’s boss Berry Gordy bowed to the inevitable and opened a Los Angeles office in November 1963. The West Coast’s home of film was taking over as America’s music business hub. Brenda Holloway was among Motown’s first California signings and spent her time with the label shuttling between LA and Detroit, recording in both cities. ERA Records was Los Angeles born, and competed with Motown on its new turf. Read more ...
theartsdesk
Of all the rock pantheon, Joni is the one who has evaded definition and over-determination better than anyone. The seemingly ethereal folkstress who partied with the most grizzled rockers and left them weeping for their mothers; the lover of the rock'n'roll life who can sing jazz standards and stand with the very greatest; the musical maestro who prefers to see herself as a painter - for all the reams of text written about her, the depths of armchair psychoanalysis attempted on her, Joni is always something other, and something more than anything you might expect. That is why, as much as any Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Liam Noble has kept his fans waiting so long for some new music, they were beginning to wonder if he’d turned into David Bowie. The British jazz pianist’s last album of originals, Romance among the Fishes, was released in 2004. Since then he’s recorded the highly regarded Brubeck, which Brubeck himself declared "an inspiration and a challenge for me to carry on”, and collaborated with distinguished players on both sides of the Atlantic. But his fans, while enjoying the live performances, which have built his reputation as one of the great piano improvisers of the contemporary scene, were Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Lady Gaga is many times more imaginative, intriguing and entertaining than her pop peers. Rihanna, Katy Perry, Ellie Goulding, Rita Ora, Jessie J, Miley Cyrus, et al - she beats the lot of ‘em, hands down. It’s always a pleasure when she arrives back into the fray, when she starts courting the media for her latest project. Her world is informed by avant-garde art, extreme fashion, literature, underground gay culture and much more. She martials it into a mesmeric melee of narcissism, performance art and high kitsch (ARTPOP’s cover, for instance, was created by Jeff Koons). What’s more, while Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Foul-mouthed Eminem is back. On his latest single, “Rap God”, he tells us he’s still as “rude and indecent as hell” before spitting out homophobic slurs like those which once brought him so much trouble. But then being foul-mouthed is kind of the point of the veteran rapper, whose combination of wit and anger often gives his music a rare cathartic power. Especially when his music is as catchy as that contained in the first Marshall Mathers LP (where, lest we forget, he even managed to turn a Dido song into a compelling narrative). How worthy a successor, then, is the second instalment?It’s Read more ...
mark.kidel
Making a film about an artist with the phenomenal range and creative effervescence of someone like Elvis Costello was never going to be easy. There have been over 30 albums since he started out in 1977, hundreds of songs, many of which are as brilliant as anything written in the last 50 years, and a series of collaborations with artists including Paul McCartney, Burt Bacharach, Bill Frisell, Chet Baker, the Brodsky Quartet, Emmylou Harris, T-Bone Burnett and many others.Portraits of great artists and musicians inevitably throw up a similar creative conundrum: I encountered it with Ravi Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When asked about sex, the newly famous Boy George cocked an eyebrow and said he’d rather have a cup of tea. He was actually at it with the drummer. Compare and contrast with Cliff Richard, into whose afternoon beverage a vat of bromide was dumped somewhere back in the Fifties. His songs have reeked of sexlessness ever since. All that mucky business involving eager groins and sweaty throbbing is not really his department.But they are the department of rock'n'roll, which was so offensive to the parents of its fans because it was overtly about kids getting into each other's knickers. Cliff Read more ...
joe.muggs
Richie Hawtin (b 1970) is no stranger to the art world, nor to working on a monumental scale. The British-born Canadian techno producer/DJ did, after all, collaborate with Jeff Koons, Jean-Luc Godard, LaMonte Young and Anish Kapoor for the French millenium celebrations. But his Dior-sponsored show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York this week may carry an even greater weight of expectations than that; techno and electronic dance music (“EDM” as its commercial form has come to be known in America) have never been bigger, and rather than a collaboration, this will be all his (well, and his Read more ...
Serena Kutchinsky
Enigmatic troubadour Connan Mockasin returns with his second album, a follow-up to 2010’s critically acclaimed Forever Dolphin Love which won him a cult following. Championed by the likes of Erol Alkan, Radiohead and Charlotte Gainsbourg, the elfin New Zealander is governed by his creative whimsy, writing music only when the mood takes him. This album is the musical equivalent of an indulgent Galaxy Caramel bar – smooth, sweet and stupor-inducing.Apparently inspired by the mellifluous qualities of the word, Caramel was self-recorded over a month in a Tokyo hotel room. It’s a concept album, of Read more ...
Russ Coffey
M.I.A’s recent single “Bad Girls” - a post-modern mix of Bhangra beats, and frustrated vocals - undeniably shows her at her most effective. It's an example of her unique take on culture and society that's long garnered critical praise. And yet, there is also a kind of empty stare in her music that others feel demonstrates a deep-down naïveté; or worse. In other words, no one really doubts that, musically, M.I.A can often brew up a pretty toxic potion, but is it real subversion or merely trendy posturing?Matangi contains both. The strongest tracks are psychotic dance-punk poems to the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
William Onyeabor: World Psychedelic Classics 5 – Who is William Onyeabor?A primitive drum machine rattles out a Latin rhythm. Keyboards begin. The gaps between the repetitive spirals of notes are plugged by blobs of fat synth. A disembodied yet warm voice sings “Good name is better than silver and gold. And no money, no money, no money, no money can buy good name.” The melody nods towards Kraftwerk’s “Computer World”. The music is as intense as early Marshall Jefferson and the whole suggests Tom Tom Club.William Onyeabor's “Good Name” is compelling and electrifying: minimal and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s a condition of certain music journalists – myself very much included – that we can be blindsided by originality to the detriment of much else. Thus I might rate a chunk of electronic weirdness that blows my mind on the first couple of listens over a more derivative piece of song-writing. Later on I sometimes find that the sonic weirdness wears thin, sucked dry of its original sparkle, while the more derivative music slowly reveals itself as something rather brilliant.I admit, then, that when I first caught up with Deap Vally, a female L.A. two-piece, one on electric guitar, the other on Read more ...